This idea is not new — it mirrors the 2,000-year-old spiritual tradition of Gnosticism, an early form of Christianity. “Gnosticism maintains that the world that we’re living in is not the ultimate reality,” says Frances Flannery Dailey, who teaches religion at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark. “It believes that the god who created this world is not the ultimate god — there is a higher God, a transcendent reality.”

“Religion and spirituality are communicated to our culture by movies much more than they are by traditional venues of synagogue or church,” Garrett says. “A really good myth does more than just create a symbolic world. It articulates the feelings that a culture already feels or believes.”

the classic movie The Matrix. As a counterpoint, they also read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from Book VII of his dialogue The Republic. Both can be seen as explorations of the value of knowledge and freedom.

If you were a chained slave or a human in a cocoon, would you like to know? Is “ignorance is bliss” a viable life?

related:

Consciousness is a mathematical pattern
Max Tegmark at TEDxCambridge 2014